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Decision Making in a businesshttp://marketgraphy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Copy-of-What-is-dark-social-1.png560315MarketGraphyMarketGraphyhttp://0.gravatar.com/avatar/91e39b6cb42b91fe1605d4e79c171d4c?s=96&d=mm&r=gJune 9, 2019June 10, 2019

The success of any business is related to several elements, among them decision making is critical. Managing and running a successful business requires making several decisions on a daily basis. On average, each manager makes about three billion decisions each year. Financial performance of the company will determine the effectiveness of these decisions.

Traditionally, decision making in organizations has been more art than science. Most of the decisions were made according to the theory of rational choice. The main reason was that most managers didn’t have access to accurate information until recently.

Conversely, although most managers now claim that their decisions are rational, it turns out that the truth is something else. Many business’s decisions are made without applying logic and expertise, carefully weighing alternatives and providing and filtering relevant evidence. It must be obvious what the result is.

Many managers think that they are great decision makers but the reality is something else. Because in most cases the results of these decisions are not tracked in the organizations, these managers convince themselves and others that the obtained decisions were the right ones.

In most cases, the reasons for this bad judgment were as followings: cognitive biases, limited attention spans, and managers tendency to overestimate their abilities in the fields that they know very little about. These reasons may cause separately or collectively to unsatisfied results.

Solutions that help managers in their decision making

There are different solutions that can help managers in their decision making processes. Among them, the application of best practices and technologies based on behavioral economics in businesses can lead to better and faster decisions. Consequently, these solutions will help managers to better meet the expectations or even exceed them.

Tracking decisions will provide managers relevant data so they can determine the effectiveness of their decisions and select best practices among them. Unfortunately, many managers don’t usually apply best practices when they are going to make a decision. They ignore this fact that the application of best practices will increase the effectiveness of their decision making.

Other solutions are available for increasing the effectiveness of decision making in an organization including placing a system for this process. This system constantly measures and improves the conducted decisions in an organization over time.

Process of effective decision making

1- Defining the decision precisely

There isn’t a single method for making all decisions. Each decision in an organization requires a specific process of decision making.

2- Gathering related information and data

Different research methods are available for gathering required details in decision making process. Among them, secondary and primary research methods can be named.

3- Determining different alternatives

Selecting different resources that might be useful in obtaining the under-questioned decision.

4- Considering the critical factors

All the attributes and factors that may influence the decision must be precisely determined. Then, all the gathered information from previous steps must be assessed and critical factors that will significantly influence the decision must be determined.

*Consider that all the obtained decisions in an organization must be in accordance to the company’s goals, objectives, and brand values.

5- Select the right alternative

After determining the critical factors and defining different alternatives, the best possible option must be selected.

6- Implementation and evaluation

For implementing the decision, all the required actions must be taken.

Evaluation of the decision is very important. Very few companies keep track of their decisions after their implementation.These organizations don’t follow the outcome of these decisions on their business and don’t check how these decisions turned out after execution. The result is, they can’t make any basis, solid reasoning and best practices for their future decisions. For avoiding this situation, all the changes that happen as the consequence of the decision must be monitored. After a while, all the decisions must be reviewed and achieving the desired results must be assessed.

What is Dark Social? What are its implications in digital marketing?http://marketgraphy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/What-is-dark-social-2.png560315MarketGraphyMarketGraphyhttp://0.gravatar.com/avatar/91e39b6cb42b91fe1605d4e79c171d4c?s=96&d=mm&r=gMay 11, 2019June 9, 2019

One of the latest trends in the field of marketing is the application of dark social. Dark Social applies to all the social media interactions that the public, search engines, and marketers can’t see, compromising communications on private social media messaging, email, WhatsApp and SMS. In other words, it is the social traffic that is invisible to most analytical programs.

Alexis C. Madrogal, first coined this term in 2012, in his article “Dark social: we have the whole history of the web wrong”. In his opinion, the sharing that we see on sites such as Facebook and Twitter is just the tip of the “social iceberg” and the most sharing is done via dark social. The challenging part of this fact is the difficulty of measuring this sharing.

Implications of Dark social in Digital marketing

From a digital marketing perspective, dark social has multiple implications. One of these applications is the role that dark social plays in web analytics. Understanding where inbound traffic comes from is critical for marketers. They need to know this information for forming their strategies and assessing the results of their activities. Unlike traceable sources, such as social media sponsored and PPC campaigns, traffic from dark social cannot be tracked on analytical tools as a single channel.

According to researches, dark social accounts for the huge amount of web content sharing that is currently taking place. Considering this fact, different analytical tools that marketers use for assessing their website’sincoming traffic just show a part of the picture to them.

Since the most valuable social traffic in most cases comes from Dark Social, marketers need to give serious consideration to dark social. The importance of this source is because the chance of conversion among this traffic is higher compared to a public post because this content is recommended from your audiences’ trusted peers. The only way that you can win this dark social is through great content, the content that worths sharing.

Many marketers are applying Dark social to better engage with their customers through using private groups and accounts on social media. In this regards, brands will have “deeper conversation” with some of their customers. Also, crossover between product and marketing can take place more easily. As a result, these deeper conversations between brands and their customers, especially those who care more about the brand, can happen in a much more meaningful way.

In contrast to online panels that most brands use for market research, dark social provides them a more natural and interactive way of communication. This will happen in a more conversational environment so respondents will feel more comfortable and brands can determine what really resonates with their target audience.

Brands are using this approach in product development and testing. Marketers are going to leverage this technique besides their common market research initiatives and in the hope of having a more natural engagement with their audiences.

The other application of this technique will be in trend analysis. Dark social can assist brands to identify trends that are starting to gain traction. Many brands are using social media and social listening techniques to not only understand what customer are saying about them but also identify the trends in the market. Through application of Dark Social, brands can get ahead of conversations. Moreover, the opportunity that dark social provides to brands enables them to listen outside their own channels.

Starbucks is one of the brands that is employing Dark Social to get a better market position. They are using this technique to reach trends faster and get better insights towards markets. In an attempt to evolve their social media strategy, they are incorporating private groups and accounts on social media to better engage with customers around product development and tasting. This initiative will help them to have deeper connections with their customers and bring product and marketing closer together.

In this article, we are using Philip Kotler’s definition of what marketing is and some related concepts that he has talked about related to the marketing and its difference with sales.

Marketing is the science and art of recognizing, creating, and offering value in order to meet the needs of specific groups of customers and provide profits”. In reality, marketing is regarding with identifying the unmet needs and wants of customers. Defining, measuring, and evaluating the size of a specific market and its potential to provide us profit is considered in marketing.
In this regards, it will be clear the company is able to accommodate the needs of which segment of the market. After identifying this segment, the company can design a particular product or service in order to serve that segment and promote this product or service in that.

Most of the marketing activities are handled inside of the company. This approach has both positive and negative consequences. The positive aspect of this approach is related to gathering professional and educated people inside a company to focus on related marketing activities of the corporation. On the other hand, the negative aspect of this approach is related to just focusing all the marketing activities in a single department rather than making these marketing activities visible in all different departments of the firm.

The most important subjects that we need to consider in the marketing field include segmentation, identifying an appropriate target market, positioning, needs and wants, offerings, brands, value and satisfaction, exchange, transaction, communication and networks, marketing channels, supply chain, competition, marketing plans and etc. These are some of the practical and functional words for the marketing professionals.

The main processes that marketing is engaged with include:
1- Identifying an opportunity
2- Developing a new product
3- Attracting customers
4- Retaining customers and creating loyalty among them
5- Delivering the orders

Indeed a company that is able to perform all these activities in the best possible way will be successful. In contrast, a company that can not deliver one of the mentioned processes above will not be able to survive in today’s competitive environment.

Misconceptions related to the marketing

There are a lot of misconceptions related to the marketing. Many businesses think that marketing is essential for supporting production processes in order to sell the produced product and make the companies’ inventories empty. However, in the reality, the situation is vice versa and many production processes need to support marketing activities. It is always possible for a company to outsource its production processes but what makes a company is its ideas and offerings regarding its marketing. Different departments of the organization such as production, logistics, research and development, finance, and etc. are created to support the core business of the company that occurs in a customer market.

Many consider that Marketing is the same concept as Sales, but this view is totally wrong. Sales is just a part of marketing and its ice berg. The hidden part of the marketing is analyzing the market, research and development of a proper product, deciding a correct price, distributing and creating awareness regarding the products and services. So, marketing is more complicated compared to sales.
In reality, sales and marketing are totally different. Marketing can not be considered as a smart way for get rid of those products that companies have developed. Marketing is the art of creating value for the customers. It is the art of helping your customers in enhancing their lives. There are three words that marketing professionals need to consider: quality, service, and value.

Sales just happens when you have a finished product. But marketing starts before any product exists. Companies perform marketing to distinguish the needs and wants of their customers and through that they will identify which products or service they need to develop. Marketing will determine how the product or service must be introduced to the market, what price must be considered for that, how you have to distribute it, and how you are going to promote your product/service in the market. Marketing will assess the results of these activities in the long term and enhance the company’s offering. Additionally, marketing will decide when to discontinue an offering.
Marketing is not a short term sales and it’s a long term investment. The process of marketing will be best performed when it begins before starting the production process of any product or entering to a new market and it continues in the long term after launching and selling the product in the market.